Friday, June 27, 2014

Nazi Analogies Ad Nauseam

Glenn Beck buried the needle on
the irony meter again.

This time it was by comparing
a Tea Party primary loss to the infamous anti-Semitic hoax The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The irony being that Glenn Beck's paranoid exposé on George Soros sounds just like Protocols
reads. Both posited a sinister conspiracy by "international
financiers" to secretly control world events. Jon Stewart did a hilarious and brilliant critique of Glenn Beck's two episode event.

Admittedly, this is not novelty anymore. Almost every one of Glenn Beck's
broadcasts is something like the Protocols
warmed-over. He is always careful to say "liberals" instead of
"Jews" but the rhetoric is otherwise identical. Indeed, do we really
need to hear anything more about Glenn Beck? We all know what he is going to
say and, as you can hear in the first link, he is audibly crumbling. His whole
voice-cracking rant was a hopeless morass of paranoid rambling:

It's the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That's really what we're
turning into. What a surprise, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, oh, that's
right, that was a Marxist-Communist thing. I forgot all about that. How
interesting it is that history always repeats itself.

But Glenn Beck is no lone loon. Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism,
is an unoriginal compendium of longstanding conservative canards – from trying
to equate birth control with eugenics to claiming that Adolf Hitler confiscated guns. Such rhetoric is nothing new, but it is everywhere today. Like traffic
accidents and school shootings, Nazi analogies are so common that we have
almost become inured to them. They are just woven into the ordinary fabric of things
in American political life now.

So how did we get here? Why does this keep happening? What explains their favorite metaphor?

I
wrote a chapter on this in my book. I quoted it a bit in the original
version of this post. Unfortunately, the result was a somewhat choppy and
unsatisfying collection of block quotes that only skimmed the surface of this issue. Recently, Donald Trump's draconian proposals have invited
Nazi comparisons, which I think should be made cautiously - but still should be made when accurate. [Edit: And many are accurate now.] So, I finally decided to drop the whole chapter into this post behind
the cut.

Let me provide some quick context beforehand.

One of my book's themes is that conservatives feel
besieged in free society. Since they are ideologically allergic to the three interdependent ideals of liberty, equality, and
democracy, their identity feels forever
threatened. So they project and question others' patriotism. Yes, authoritarians the world-over obsess over loyalty and belonging, but this glaring contradiction makes American conservatives particularly prickly. It explains why their defensive narratives invariably go awry - and why so angrily.

The right's longstanding hostility to democracy is especially well-documented. Accordingly, the left had historically responded with anti-aristocratic rhetoric - especially against the rich. Mark Twain pointed out that Gilded Age robber barons loved medieval architecture. From the American Revolution to the New Deal, conservatives were often called monarchists and Tories. Of course, World War II changed that making it fashionable to call reactionaries fascists. But conservatives are still called Tories throughout the rest of the English-speaking world, and I ultimately argue that we should revive the label stateside.

So, without additional ado, here is the chapter:

8: Springtime for Goldberg

Behind the Right’s Bizarre Nazi Analogies

It is probably a positive thing that most people react to
Nazi analogies with instant suspicion. Such comparisons are lurid, ridiculous,
and nowadays ubiquitous. Today, Nazi-analogies pepper political discourse as
never before. It has become the earmark of arguments that are lazy, crazy, or
both – and there are plenty of those out there.

It
would be good to have a moratorium on this metaphor, but unfortunately such a
pact would probably not last. The reason goes beyond the loss of civility in
political discourse. Conservatives cannot stop making Nazi analogies any more
than they can stop questioning their opponents’ patriotism. Both are basically
the same projecting. Twisting history is a defensive reflex. It is the result
of their anti-democratic animus. And World War II is not the only historical
period they distort – the Enlightenment, the Civil War, and the Progressive Era
especially all go through their Orwellian meat grinder.

Conservatives
really began hammering liberals with Nazi analogies in the 1990s. Rush Limbaugh
called feminists “feminazis” by comparing abortion to the Holocaust while
forgetting or ignoring that abortion was verboten
in the Fatherland. Likewise, the militia movement used Nazi analogies while
lionizing white supremacists
like Randy Weaver. The use of this tactic has only grown since then.

This
is not to say liberals have never played the Nazi card. Quite to the contrary,
it admittedly has been a longstanding political tradition. But something
fundamental has changed. There was once a sort of understanding in the badlands
of political hyperbole that conservatives were called “fascists” and liberals were
called “communists.” It was how each called the other extremists along the
political spectrum of left and right. But now, right is left and vice versa. All history and ideology are
turned inside out. Except that leftists do not call conservatives “communists”
– at least, not seriously.(1)

How
did we get here? I have a theory. After a century of conservatives red-baiting
everything from the eight-hour work day to school desegregation, the communist
label had lost a lot of its emotional traction. Civil disobedience behind the
Iron Curtain had torn it down so Ronald Reagan’s old “evil empire” rhetoric
rang irrelevant in a world with only one superpower. The crumbling of the
Eastern Block made communists seem pathetic rather than scary. And since
conservatives mostly motivate voters through fear, this geopolitical triumph
posed to be a novel problem for them. They needed a new bogeyman.

Calling
liberals “Nazis” was their solution. The beginning and end of their argument
seems to be that the word “Nazi” was the German acronym for the National
Socialist German Workers Party. Add a rant about big government to that and you
have the sum total of their point. It is a compelling argument if you know
absolutely nothing about Hitler’s rise to power or what he subsequently did
with it.

From
there, they argue that using government to do virtually anything is inherently
fascist. It is ultimately an argument against modernity. This is why they claim
that fascism had actually originated with the French Revolution. As we shall
see, it is not just a rhetorical weapon against liberals, but a weapon against
the concept of progress itself that equates social change with guillotines and
gas chambers. Any modernity is automatically associated with state terror.

Traditionalists
are predictably pretty addicted to this interpretation, and getting them into
detox is highly unlikely. They are almost adorably proud of their “I’m rubber,
you’re glue” argument. They decry Nazi analogies as if they had never done any
red-baiting. But now they can do both at the same time and act like they are
only hitting back.

Of
course, conservatives pounce on any opportunity to turn the tables, however
nonsensical – thus their favorite phrase “liberals are the real racists.” Nazi analogies are just another variant of this.

But,
as I suggested before, there is more to their narrative’s attraction than that.
Deep down, they know that their authoritarian, anti-egalitarian mindset is
utterly un-American. Naturally, this contradiction creates tension and
projection is their automatic response.(2)

And,
once again, this is not limited to Nazi analogies. Conservatives are
chronically on the wrong side of history, so they must constantly rewrite it –
thus their many strange attempts to co-opt FDR, MLK, JFK, etc. Consider Ted
Nugent claiming that Rosa Parks is one of his heroes when he is not calling
President Obama a “subhuman mongrel.”

Conservatives
are in a perpetual identity crisis. They are touchy because their sense of
patriotism and belonging feel under constant assault. This is not only because
of their fear of change, but also because they hate everything America stands
for and cannot admit it. Thus, anything they say on the matter is an attempt to
square a circle. But their Nazi analogies will be my central focus in this
chapter because they define the current political zeitgeist and they say a lot about how conservatives think and
operate.

Let’s
begin with some debunking. Unfortunately, it is necessary.

The
best place to start would be with the Nazi acronym. Initially, it appears to be
a great inconvenience. The words “National Socialist German Workers Party”
pretty much say it all, right?

Except
that it does not because the Nazis were notorious liars. Adolf Hitler said that
people will swallow a big lie more easily than a small one, and their party
name was a whopper. I seriously doubt that they would have gotten too far in
the Great Depression calling themselves the National Capitalist German Bosses
party.

In
fact, the far right often founds deceptively-named groups. Take, for example,
Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University or Phyllis Schlafly’s Independent Women’s
Forum. This is basically the same strategy behind company unions, phony
abortion clinics, and polluter-funded “Astroturf” (as opposed to grassroots)
green groups. “Truth in Advertising” is not a conservative strong suit and many
contemporary observers had called out Adolf Hitler’s pseudo-socialism. As
journalist George Seldes wrote in 1943, “He stole the word.”(3)

In
fact, the party’s name was a mixed message which should have red-flagged the
lie. Since when did nationalists and socialists get along? Socialism is
internationalist, hence the “Internationale.” Therefore, socialists in every
country had ideologically opposed involvement in World War I. Their slogan was
“A bayonet is a tool with a worker on both ends.” True, many succumbed to
emotional jingoism and betrayed their principles, but others worked hard to
avert war. The issue had bitterly split them. For example, in Germany, Rosa
Luxemburg scathingly criticized those who had voted for war in 1914.

By
contrast, nationalists happily jumped in with unified, ideologically consistent
agreement. Of course they would – war validates and magnifies their violent,
tribal, “us vs. them” mindset, making society brutally hunt and punish any
“traitor” who does not share it. Thus, it becomes a very handy excuse for
attacking actual socialists, which the Nazis later did. Thus, their name
combined phony socialism with actual nationalism.

Nazi
rhetoric constantly changed like a chameleon. They talked an anti-capitalist
line to workers, and a pro-capitalist one to their employers. In fact, all
fascist parties used this technique. Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, wrote
quite florid pro-capitalist prose, reminiscent of the self-actualization
business literature that management gurus later churned out throughout the
1990s. “Private property completes the human personality: it is a right and
therefore an obligation.”(4)
Ayn Rand could have written that line.

Of
course, Adolf Hitler could also sound like Ayn Rand. In a speech to businessmen
linking democracy with communism, he argued that great differences in talent
justified great differences in wealth. Hitler wanted to communicate that he was
no collectivist, and only a little pinch of religion distinguished his rhetoric
from Rand’s:

This
entire structure of culture, down to its foundations and in each of its
building blocks, is nothing other than the result of creative talent, the
achievement of intelligence, and [of] the industriousness of individuals. The
greatest results are the great crowning achievement of individual geniuses
endowed by God …(5)

Anticipating
Ayn Rand’s producer/parasite rhetoric, Adolf Hitler blasted the “exploitation
of creators, of geniuses, and talented men.” Turning back to the topic of
democracy, he decried “subjugating the genius to the majority” and fumed, “This
is not the rule of the people, but in fact the rule of stupidity, of
mediocrity, of half-measures, of cowardice, of weakness, and inadequacy.”
Naturally, Hitler did not give the same speech to factory hands or the angry
unemployed.

The
Nazis talked out of both sides of their mouths. This explains how they were
both a political joke and attractive to desperate voters. Mixed messages
capitalize on mixed feelings, which are widespread in times of crisis. They are
political Rorschach tests in which people see what they want to see. And while
such self-contradictions often turn off thinking people, those hungry to
identify with something do not care. In fact, emotional voters rarely notice.
They just think the speaker shares their mixed feelings. They see the speaker
as “like me” and may even become protective of the speaker. As Adolf Hitler had
bragged, “Confusion, indecision, fear; these are my weapons.”(6)

So,
the fascists double-crossed everyone, right? Well, not quite. They remained
very friendly to big business. During the Night of Long Knives, Adolf Hitler
had any Brown Shirt leaders who took his anti-capitalist rhetoric seriously
slain in their beds. He did not want to see any Aryan capitalists harassed. In
fact, the Nazis and big business got along famously. They needed each other:
Adolf Hitler liquidated the Reds, for which capital was grateful. And capital
was essential to Hitler’s long-range plans because “mom & pop shops” do not
make planes and tanks. For that, you need heavy industry. Once in power, Hitler
outlawed labor unions – a longstanding wet dream of industrialists. Actions
speak louder than words and Hitler’s actions showed that he was no socialist.

Again,
bait-and-switch was a favorite fascist tactic. Benito Mussolini had pledged to
enact land reform for Italian peasants. Great aristocratic estates were
supposed to be broken up into small family plots for poor farmers. He proposed
this to co-opt a land reform movement that had already been active in Italy
since the end of World War I. Consider this quote that he made shortly after he
seized power and was still solidifying his position. Note how he still felt it
necessary to pay lip service to democracy:

I love the working classes. The supremest
[sic] ambition and the dearest hope of my life has been, and is still, to see
them better treated and enjoying conditions of life worthy of the citizens of a
great nation. … I do not believe in class war, but in cooperation between
classes. The Fascist government will devote all its efforts to the creation of
an agrarian democracy based on the principle of small ownership. The great
estates must be handed over to the peasant communities: the great capitalists
of agriculture must submit to a process of harmonization of their rights with
those of the peasants.(7)

For
those who associate socialism with fascism, this quote is a smoking gun. But
Benito Mussolini betrayed Italy’s peasants in less than two months. He not only
stopped land reform, he even reversed
it by returning land that the peasants had already taken for themselves. Of
course, why would any dictator want to divide up property amongst the poor to
create a Jeffersonian republic of small yeoman farmers? To paraphrase the Soup
Nazi in "Seinfeld," no forty acres and
a mule for YOU!

Instead,
Mussolini built what he called the Corporate State, in which big business and
government cooperated to ensure a docile populace and workforce.

Naturally,
America’s captains of industry were in love. They asked, “How can WE get some of that sweet action?” As U.S. ambassador
William E. Dodd warned upon his return from Berlin in 1937, “Fascism is on the
march today in America. Millionaires are marching to the tune. It will come in
this country unless a strong defense is set up by all liberal and progressive
forces.”(8)
He then elaborated:

A clique of U.S. industrialists is
hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic form of
government, and is working closely with the fascist regime in Italy and
Germany. Aboard ship a prominent executive of one of America’s largest
financial corporations told me point-blank that if the progressive trend of the
Roosevelt administration continued, he would be ready to take definite action
to bring Fascism to America. Certain American industrialists had a great deal
to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They
extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to
keep it there.

Note
the use of the word “progressive.” It does not mean what Glenn Beck thinks. And
in a letter to senators published in the New
York Times, Ambassador Dodd wrote:

There are individuals of great wealth who
wish a dictatorship and are ready to help a Huey Long. There are politicians
who think they may gain powers like those exercised in Europe. One man, I have
been told by personal friends, who owns near a billion dollars, is ready to
support such a program and, of course, control it.(9)

Some
of these tycoons were coy about their fascist enthusiasms and some were not.
For example, Henry Ford’s sympathies were quite overt. And he was not the only
one. General Motors’ president William S. Knudsen told a New York Times reporter that Hitler’s Germany was “the miracle of
the 20th Century."(10)

This
is not to say that the press sat on the sidelines and simply reported.
Publishers all over America adored Adolf Hitler and loathed Franklin D.
Roosevelt. We are often told FDR’s fireside chats were meant to reassure a
shaken nation in the depths of the Great Depression. But they were also the
only way that he could make his case to the people undistorted. Most publishers
were openly pro-fascist prior to Pearl Harbor. As George Seldes noted, William
Randolph Hearst’s newspapers “published signed propaganda articles of Goering,
Goebbels and Co.”
(11) Hearst interpreted his status as a press baron pretty literally. He built and
lived in a Bavarian-style castle in California. Therefore, cartoonists often
drew him as a king. Fortune magazine’s
July 1934 issue loved Benito Mussolini so much that Seldes called it “a song of
praise for Fascism.”(12)

Much
of the business establishment saw fascism as a solution to communism. But to
those with anti-democratic, aristocratic attitudes, fascism was already
attractive even without any communist threat. If you equated liberty and
equality with chaos and longed for a strongman to defend tradition, your latent
monarchism was already aroused. Simply put, fascism was monarchism modernized
for the 20th Century – aristocracy made sleek, streamlined, and posh like an
art deco Tamara de Lempicka painting. And the fact that workers were actually
in revolt only added urgency, making political reaction seem hip, edgy, and
relevant. To conservatives, the birth of fascism was an affirming breath of
fresh air. They saw it not as a necessary evil but as a happy model to copy.

Jonah
Goldberg is a big promoter of the notion that socialism is fascism. The
National Review Online editor had written a column called “Springtime for
Slanderers; Who are you calling a Nazi?” He later expanded it into a book
called Liberal Fascism: The Secret
History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Goldberg’s article pretends to be a plea against using Nazi analogies, but it
is predictably littered with them. He closed his column with this curious
challenge:

And one last point I feel compelled to
point out. I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer
the following question without having to think real hard: “Aside from the
murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?” And
I’ve never met a conservative who didn’t have an answer at his fingertips. So,
who’s really closer to being a Nazi?(13)

Well,
what can I say? I am speechless.

The
obvious answer is “Everything” but
Jonah Goldberg seems unlikely to accept that. He wants specifics and that is
difficult because any specific thing I could mention pales next to genocide.
Things like institutional racism, press censorship, outlawing labor unions,
etc. are certainly all bad, but they are not genocide bad. That evil eclipses everything else. Thus, people are
stunned, not stumped.

What
makes Jonah Goldberg’s query especially absurd is the völkisch (folk-ish)
“family values” voters who helped put the Nazis in power in the first place.
The horrors of World War I had discredited the old Victorian order throughout
Europe and the Jazz Age took its place. Germany’s conservative institutions
were particularly hard hit. They had invested all their prestige and political
credibility in eventual victory. Thus, with the ignominy of defeat, the
monarchy, the military, and the church lost their all their cultural authority
over society. Kaiser Wilhelm cowardly skipped the country and the blue-nosed
Prussian prudery that had once rivaled Great Britain’s went with it. Germany
finally let her hair down – and bobbed it. Berlin quickly eclipsed Paris as the
id of Europe. There was gay and lesbian visibility and frank talk about sex as
women got jobs previously reserved for men and demanded both the vote and the
right to abortion. This was going on throughout the Western World, but in
Germany the effect was far more jarring.

Of
course, conservatives regrouped. Their attitude can be summed up in the title
of Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards
Gomorrah. They thought society was suffering from a deficit of discipline
and equated liberty and equality with both spiritual and material ruin. They
craved a return to order and a society where everyone knew their place. Thus,
Hitler appealed to cultural conservatives. Like Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in
America,” Hitler promised national renewal in a nostalgic fashion. The only
overtly welcome modernity was technology, especially military technology. All
other modern ideas were considered poisonous foreign imports – infections to be
purged from the German bloodstream.

This
can be seen in their gender politics. They considered women’s true concerns to
be “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” –
children, kitchen, and church. But the three Ks had little appeal for young
German women whose ambitions went beyond being hausfraus. Predictably, many older, traditional women were both
jealous and horrified. Much like Phyllis Schlafly’s Independent Women’s Forum,
these church ladies formed anti-feminist women’s groups in response. And, like
Ann Coulter, they were anti-choice in every sense of the word – they thought
giving women the vote was a huge mistake.(14) But once they had it, they had no problem using it to oppose more progress. For
example, Nationalist Party Reichstag delegate Clara Mende was a longtime
opponent of women’s suffrage, but of course that did not stop her from running
for office once she could vote.(15) As Claudia Koontz noted in Mothers in the
Fatherland, “these women wanted ‘Emancipation from Emancipation!’ – a
slogan later taken up by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.”(16)Adolf Hitler stated, “[T]he term ‘women’s emancipation’ is invented by Jewish
intellectuals, and its meaning was imbued with the same spirit.”(17) When these groups merged into one umbrella organization under the Nazis, their
guidelines stipulated that they would eschew “the false steps of the
democratic-liberal-international women’s movement which ignores the source of
the woman’s soul that comes from God
[italics in original] and nationality [Volkstum].”(18) They were basically Sarah Palin’s anti-feminist “mama grizzlies.”

This
anxiety can be seen in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis. Its message was that a
return to church and tradition will save society from destructive class
conflict. This was symbolized by the character Maria, the hot young church
lady, bringing everyone together on the medieval cathedral’s steps at the
film’s climax. When she repeatedly preaches that the heart must mediate between
the head and the hand, she means between capital and labor. By contrast, her
evil robot doppelganger dressed like a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl and reveled
in sex. The android false Maria represented the liberated, “selfish” New Woman,
and her wanton thrill-seeking had almost physically destroyed Metropolis. The
metaphor could not possibly have been plainer to German audiences, and Adolf
Hitler loved this film’s affirmation of tradition and hierarchy.(19)

Where
sexuality is feared, freedom is never safe and it was not hard for German
conservatives to convert prudish discomfort into political reaction. Sexual
liberty was depicted as both a symptom of social decay and a foreboding
metaphor for freedom itself. Pat Buchanan summed up their attitude aptly
because he shares it: “Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost
always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a
collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.”(20) Traditionalists wanted somebody to make the gays go away and Adolf Hitler
delivered – albeit more literally than they might have imagined. The Nazis
immediately outlawed pornography and “degenerate art.” They made the punishment
for abortion far more severe and birth control far harder to obtain.(21) There was a “Reich Headquarters for the Combating of Homosexuality and
Abortion.”(22) Never was government so much in people’s bedrooms. But bedrooms are not
boardrooms, so conservative enthusiasm remained undimmed.

Most
people are probably not familiar with this history. If you asked them to
picture women in Nazi Germany, they would likely think of a blond dominatrix
wearing an SS uniform. No doubt this is exactly what Rush Limbaugh wants you to
imagine when he says “feminazi.” He wants to make feminism threatening. And
ignorance of this history is probably another reason why people draw a blank
when Jonah Goldberg asks them what was wrong with the Nazis besides genocide.

Well,
there’s one answer.

At
this point, you might have noticed a pattern – the familiar marriage of
economic and cultural conservatives. Now, I am not saying that being both
automatically makes you a fascist. There are some other benchmarks as well.
Contempt for democracy would be a big one, and racism would be another huge factor.
But I am saying that fascists are
both and that the idea that they are “actually socialists” had long been
utterly debunked. To put it another way, all pit bulls are dogs, but not all
dogs are pit bulls. But Jonah Goldberg would have you believe that a pit bull
is actually a kind of cat.

George
Seldes had weighed in on this issue back in 1938:

It is becoming more and more commonplace –
despite the attack of purists and the students of semantics – to use the words
conservatives and Fascist as synonyms. There are of course considerable
differences, although every man who is a Fascist is ipso facto a conservative,
and the reverse is not necessarily true. It is true, however, that the man who
founded Fascism defined it as reactionary and anti-liberal.(23)

George
Seldes was referring to Benito Mussolini’s article “Force and Consent” in the
March 1923 issue of Gerarchia.(24) That was his party’s official publication. Its title means “hierarchy” in
Italian. Of course, real socialists do not like hierarchy. As Robert Bork
wrote, “Radical egalitarians necessarily hate hierarchies.”(25) By contrast, many conservatives admire hierarchy and mock democracy. Gerarchia’s subscribers would have no
doubt nodded in agreement with Bork’s critique of liberty and equality, not to
mention Samuel Johnson’s notion that subordination is “most conducive to the
happiness of society.”(26) Despite this, Bork’s 1997 Slouching
Towards Gomorrah is full of the same ass-backwards Nazi analogies that we
hear from Glenn Beck today.

Conservatives’
confusing socialism with communism is somewhat saner because communism is
indeed a form of socialism, just as a Manx is a kind of cat – and just as
fascism is a kind of conservatism. Communism is an extreme form of socialism
just as fascism is an extreme form of conservatism. But, likewise, the Islamic
Republic of Iran qualifies as a republic by John Adams’s very broad definition,
so does that mean that all republics are thus tyrannies? Also recall George
Orwell’s opinion on the Soviet Union’s so-called “socialism.”(27) Sweden is a socialist country, but it does not have Soviet-style gulags. It is
a free society and it has not invaded any of its neighbors in centuries.

As
if anticipating all this nonsense, George Seldes put things in perspective in
an interview a few years before his death. He mused:

I don’t think there is one
American in a hundred that knows anything of the difference between socialism
and communism. To me, to them, sometimes they even talk about the ‘-isms’ as if
all ‘-isms’ were alike, including even fascism.(28)

Of
course, if I were Jonah Goldberg, I would not ask “who is closer to being a
Nazi,” when we can just play Six Degrees of Joseph Sobran. Goldberg edits the National Review Online, and Sobran had
worked for the print edition for seven
years while championing Holocaust-denying journals.(29) Eventually, Joseph Sobran’s anti-Semitic activities became a big enough
liability that William F. Buckley finally fired him in 1993, but the two men
later reconciled before their deaths. I should also note that Ann Coulter wrote
a very warm obituary for Sobran entitled “Not Your Average Joe.”(30) Suddenly, Gore Vidal calling William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” starts to seem
slightly less hyperbolic.

Still
uncertain? Then let me jog your memory.

In
1992, the National Review had
actually endorsed Pat Buchanan for president. Recall that Buchanan had arranged
Ronald Reagan’s Bitburg Cemetery visit in 1985. Reagan defended the visit by
saying that the SS officers buried there “were victims just as surely as the
victims in the concentration camps.”(31) (Conservatives sure have a gift for spin.) While working in the Reagan White
House, Buchanan had also tried to get the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting
Office of Special Investigations closed.

Pat
Buchanan has a lengthy record of defending fascists, so it is not necessary to
review all the details. My point here is that the National Review cannot claim that they did not really know Buchanan
before they endorsed him. As I mentioned in the last chapter, Pat Buchanan
wrote for the Review. In fact, the
magazine had helped shape his ideological foundations in his early 20s. He was
deeply influenced by the Review’s
racist foreign policy columnist James Burnham.(32) Both supported the white minority regime in Rhodesia. William F. Buckley
himself was a McCarthyite. Yes, he was erudite, but he had thuggish politics –
thus, he and Buchanan were pretty similar. Buckley might have regretted
defending Jim Crow in the 1950s, but that did not alter his pro-Apartheid take
on South Africa in the 1980s. Sounding a lot like Buchanan, Buckley had mocked
“one man, one vote” as a “fanatical abstraction” that we should not foist on
South Africa.(33) Therefore, there is no denying that Pat Buchanan was the direct product of this
publication. Thus, the Review knew
exactly who they were endorsing.

Of
course, Jonah Goldberg says that Pat Buchanan is not really a conservative
because of his reversal on free trade. He writes, “Buchanan calls himself a
‘paleoconservative,’ but in truth he’s a neo-progressive.”(34) Somehow I doubt that Buchanan embraces that label.

And,
speaking of Pats, the National Review
had even excused Reverend Pat Robertson’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and
attacked his critics. When Michael Lind tried to drive Robertson out of the
conservative movement, the Review
drove Lind out instead.(35) That is taking a stand. Thus, methinks that Jonah Goldberg doth protest too
much on the name calling front.

William
F. Buckley is frequently credited with driving anti-Semites out of the
conservative movement, but he actually harbored and defended them as long as
possible. In his book, Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Liberalism, unlike conservatism,
is operationally uninterested in its own intellectual history.”(36) And yet he is operationally uninterested in the intellectual history of his own magazine. In this light, his
prickliness is pretty predictable.

Indeed,
the very idea that liberals and leftists cannot face their history is
absolutely hilarious. We are very adept at tearing down our own idols. That
comes with practice. We are quite good at acknowledging that Thomas Jefferson
owned slaves or that Franklin D. Roosevelt put Japanese Americans in internment
camps during World War II. In fact, I had first read that Woodrow Wilson was a
racist from a progressive historian, James W. Loewen, in his best seller Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your
American History Textbook Got Wrong. My paperback copy has a cover blurb by
Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling A
People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present. Jonah Goldberg is
projecting a conservative trait because when liberals acknowledge such ugly
facts, conservatives automatically accuse them of “hating America.”

What
I have written thus far is largely a response to Jonah Goldberg’s article. His
book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History
of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, is even
loopier. Like Plan 9 from Outer Space,
it is so bad that it is good. Yes, it is nauseating and dishonest; but it is
often hard not to laugh.

For
example, he actually argues that the film Dead
Poets Society is fascist. To his Orwellian thinking, insubordination is
authoritarian and encouraging people to think for themselves is starting a
cult. I must admit that certainly can happen. But not everyone who tries to be
a catalyst for liberty is Ayn Rand.

Jonah
Goldberg’s credibility is already shot, so mocking his book seems gratuitous at
this point. But there is more here than a car accident-like fascination with
his ridiculous revisionism. His book is part of a far larger assault on the
Progressive Era that has become increasingly visible in recent years. The Cato
Institute had already been putting out books like Richard A. Epstein’s How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
for years before Goldberg wrote Liberal
Fascism. Cato fellow Jim Powell wrote a Glenn Beck-like book called Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great
Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II. It just barely beat
Liberal Fascism to the shelves. Goldberg’s
book is part of a genre.

As
Jonah Goldberg said on Glenn Beck’s show, “I’m actually not the first person to
say this. I’m actually taking a lot from other historians and putting it all in
one place which you can’t find anywhere else.”(37)

That
is one way to put it. But I think Chip Berlet was being more accurate when he
called Goldberg’s book a compendium of John Birch Society articles published
over the last fifty years.(38) Either way, these ideas are not new. But the Tea Party has breathed new life
into them and Jonah Goldberg’s tome is your convenient one-stop shop for such
thought.

Conservatives
are hostile to every Progressive Era accomplishment. Newt Gingrich considers
child labor laws to be “truly stupid.” U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) thinks they
are unconstitutional. And Maine Governor Paul LePage (R) wants to loosen his
state’s so that twelve year olds can work for two dollars less than minimum
wage, which he calls a “training wage.” And, as I wrote before, both John
Stossel and Arthur C. Brooks have defended robber barons. Ever since historians
started pointing out the ugly similarities between our era and the Gilded Age,
sweatshop apologists have had job security. And since the best defense is a
good offense, they paint progressives as proto-fascists.

There
is a tactical aspect to this approach as well. It is the path of least
resistance. Those who loathe Franklin D. Roosevelt are a tiny minority. He was
a very popular president and remains so today. Accordingly, conservatives have
turned their guns more on the dour Woodrow Wilson because he is a much easier
target. Defaming the New Deal is a pretty difficult trick, so they start with
the less well-known Progressive Era instead. Obviously, this is their backdoor
assault on the New Deal. But, as I shall show shortly, it is also their
backdoor assault on the Enlightenment and America’s core liberal principles as
well.

As
I wrote before, conservatives make Nazi analogies because they are projecting.
But their strategists have harnessed this defensive reflex and written an alternative
narrative around it. Liberal Fascism
is part and parcel of this far larger project. So, yes, I am going to keep
mocking Jonah Goldberg. But his name is no more or less a punch line than, say,
Glenn Beck’s or that of any Fox News host making the same insane claims.
Goldberg is simply serviceable shorthand for the conservative movement as a
whole at this moment.

Let
us start with Jonah Goldberg’s strongest argument. He correctly mentions that
some of the Progressive Era’s birth control advocates had briefly flirted with
the eugenics movement which had advocated the forced sterilization of
“undesirable” parts of the population, meaning poor minorities. (This is a
favorite argument among opponents of birth control and abortion and therefore
nothing new.) The eugenics movement had attracted people from across the
political spectrum including, of course, conservatives. In fact, both groups
had ideologically mixed memberships. As historian Jill Lepore noted of Margaret
Sanger:

She really did court eugenicists; at one
point, the American Birth Control League discussed a merger with the American
Eugenics Society. But Sanger was a socialist, which often put her at odds with
the eugenicists and with her own organization as well. A survey conducted of
nearly a thousand members of the American Birth Control League in 1927 found
its membership to be more Republican than the rest of the country.(39)

It
was a case of odd political bedfellows that predictably did not work out.
Eugenicists opposed voluntary birth control because they thought the state must
decide who should reproduce. Sterilizing the “unfit” was only half of their
plan. The other half was making sure the “fit” had children – whether they
wanted to or not. Therefore, eugenics movement leader Paul Poponoe wrote that
“birth control is the reverse of eugenics.”(40)

Jonah
Goldberg at least admits that liberals do not advocate eugenics today. But he
fails to mention eugenics’ endurance in some conservative circles. Take, Doctor
Roger Pearson, for example. When he first visited the U.S. in 1958, he was the
London-based organizer for the Northern League, a white supremacist group that
included former SS officials.(41) He then founded, edited, and/or wrote for many racist publications, such as Northern World and Western Destiny. In his 1966 book, Eugenics and Race, he bluntly wrote, “If a nation with a more
advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with,
instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide.”(42)

Ugly
stuff. But his activities were not limited to the fringes. For many years, he
was on the editorial board of the Heritage Foundation publication Policy Review. And, in turn, many
Heritage staffers had joined Pearson’s innocuously named Journal ofSocial and Economic
Studies. In 1978, Policy Review
dropped Pearson from its masthead when the Washington
Post exposed him. But the linkage continued. As investigative reporter Russ
Bellant wrote, “Heritage’s director for domestic issues, Stuart Butler, joined
Pearson’s Journal, as did right-wing
sociologist Ernest van den Haag of National
Review.”(43)

Ancient
history? Not quite. Roger Pearson’s work was the basis for The Bell Curve, the 1994 book that claimed intelligence is based on
race.(44) The National Review openly championed
that racist book. Indeed, today, one of its authors, Charles Murray, remains a
regular contributor to the National
Review and the National Review Online.
What Charles Murray says today is obviously more relevant that what Margaret
Sanger had said in 1927.

Indeed,
Goldberg even defends Murray in his book Liberal
Fascism. “But whatever the merits or demerits of The Bell Curve may be, the simple fact is the Murray and Herrnstein
were making a deeply libertarian case for state nonintervention.”(45) In other words, racist junk science is A-Okay as long as government does not
act on it.

Of
course, I have grave doubts about racists resisting the temptation to use the
state’s power when they get it. Murray Rothbard’s endorsing Pat Buchanan shows
how slippery those deeply libertarian principles can be. The Tea Party loved
Arizona’s “papers, please” law for harassing Hispanics and I do not trust those
paleo-“libertarians” on abortion or gay rights either. Their political reflexes
are anything but freedom-friendly.

Also
recall that, in 1986, the National Review’s
founder, William F. Buckley, had proposed that “Everyone detected with AIDS
should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on
the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”(46)That policy does not sound terribly libertarian to me.

Again,
the eugenics issue is Jonah Goldberg’s strongest argument. But it is still not
smart for him to draw attention to it – not for him or for the conservative
movement as a whole. Yes, it is particularly embarrassing for him, but the
Heritage Foundation does not come off too much better. Well, Goldberg’s
arguments only get worse from there.

Like
Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg preys on his audience’s ignorance. He invokes obscure
historical events and omits important context. Because Hollywood has largely
ignored these moments, you either know about them or you do not. Most do not
and Goldberg uses this as an opportunity to rewrite history.

For
example, he says that progressives were responsible for loyalty oaths and the
Palmer Raids without mentioning that these activities were both parts of the
First Red Scare. These shameful incidents rarely make it into high school
history textbooks. And where are you going to see the deportation of Emma
Goldman depicted in film outside of Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981)? Was there a recent remake? Most Americans only know
about the Second Red Scare, which is more popularly known as the McCarthy Era.
So for them, the First Red Scare is a blank slate which Jonah Goldberg is happy
to fill.

Woodrow
Wilson was responsible for loyalty
oaths and the Palmer Raids, but that does not make them progressive actions. By
that logic, liberals must oppose social programs since President Clinton signed
“welfare reform.” Indeed, Clinton’s pro-business policies included signing
NAFTA. Does that mean that labor unions, a traditional Democratic Party
constituency, favored the trade pact as well? Obviously not.

Clinton
also signed the Defense of Marriage Act and “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.” So, I
suppose that makes conservatives champions of gay rights. Perhaps they will
claim that when they next rewrite their movement’s history. Today, they compare
themselves to Rosa Parks – so, perhaps tomorrow they will compare themselves to
Harvey Milk.

Getting
back to the Progressive Era, should we suppose that J. Edgar Hoover was a
progressive for his role in the Palmer Raids? And did the conservatives of that
era oppose any of Wilson’s actions? Of course not, because they were basically conservative
moves.

Likewise,
Jonah Goldberg alludes to the American Legion’s fascist links but not their
anti-union violence. Simply put, the Legion was capitalism’s storm troopers.
Goldberg quotes the Legion’s 1923 National Commander Alvin Owsley saying, “If
ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s
institutions and ideals as the fascisti
dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy.”(47) Except Goldberg neglects to mention that Owsley said these “destructionists”
were all leftists – “[S]oviets, anarchists, IWW, revolutionary socialists and
every other ‘red.’” Goldberg cites to two sources and both give the whole
quote.(48) He mentions in passing that these leftists were targeted by other vigilante
groups with Woodrow Wilson’s encouragement, but he does not acknowledge that
the Legion did the same things. Their business was brutally pro-business.

Jonah
Goldberg has a chronic habit of chopping off the important ends of historical
quotes. Frequently, the very next sentence either contradicts or undermines his
point. He wrote, “What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he ‘produces for
the masses. That little car of his had done more than anything else to destroy
class differences.’”(49) Jonah Goldberg presents this as a socialist quote, but it is the opposite.
Hitler’s next sentence was “You may envy the man who owns a better machine than
yours, but you do not hate him.”(50) Hitler wanted to eliminate class antagonism, not class itself. By “differences”
he meant conflicts, not distinctions, because other people will still have
sweeter wheels.

Moreover,
Hitler was making the familiar conservative argument that social change comes
from markets rather than movements – products not politics. Pat Buchanan had
said something similar about women’s liberation: “The real liberators of
American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile,
the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the
freezer.”(51)

That
Adolf Hitler quote about automobiles came from a fawning 1933 New York Times interview which is rich
with interesting tidbits that contradict Jonah Goldberg’s thesis. Hitler almost
sounds like he is addressing the Chamber of Commerce. In the next paragraph, we
read that Hitler warned his followers “against weakening the economic forces of
the nation by hounding and bullying employers.” And in the paragraph after
that, the Fuehrer boasted, “We are
cutting red tape drastically. We are plowing through the bureaucratic hierarchy
that stifled us. We have to reduce the government’s cost and its size.” Sign
that man up with FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth!

Jonah
Goldberg also claims that progressives adore war because it supposedly allows
them to advance their agenda. “Like [Theodore] Roosevelt, Croly and his
colleagues looked forward to many more wars because war was the midwife of
progress.”(52) He explains, “During wartime this country has historically done whatever it
takes to see things through. But in peacetime the American character is not
inclined to look to the state for meaning and direction. Liberals have
responded to this by constantly searching for new crises, new moral
equivalencies to war.”(53)

Really?
Is that why we had the First Red Scare after the First World War and the Second
Red Scare after the Second World War? If the Palmer Raids were “progressive” in
nature, then the McCarthy Hearings must be too. Yet, I have difficulty
imagining the left engineering or benefiting from either of these periods.
Historically, wars make people more conservative. It is ludicrous to suggest
any different, let alone the opposite.

And
how many perpetual wars have conservatives started, stoked, or exploited? After
the Cold War, the War on Drugs was the next excuse for expanding police powers.
Then there was the War on Terror, which Dick Cheney said would never end.

Incidentally,
the War on Terror is conspicuously absent from the index of Jonah Goldberg’s
book, but the War on Poverty merits four mentions. It is an odd yardstick of
liberal bellicosity. Goldberg does mention the War on Drugs, but he lists it as
a liberal enterprise.(54) Perhaps he thinks that Nancy Reagan was Jimmy Carter’s spouse. And to pad his
list of liberals’ wars even further, he mentions the “war on cancer.” That
sounds like a pretty apolitical campaign to me, but Goldberg has a ready answer
for that too. In the very next line, he suggests that exhorting people to “get
beyond politics” is fascist.(55) Apparently, even centrists are Nazis,
now.

Goldberg
is, of course, projecting. Conservatives are ideologically incentivized to
promote war. Psychological research shows that reminding people of death makes
them more dogmatic in their beliefs and more punitive in enforcing them.(56) People in a life-or-death mindset are impatient with details, nuance, or shades
of gray. Everything is “It’s either us or them,” which is not terribly
conducive to tolerant, liberal thought. No wonder conservative pundits such as
Stu Bykofsky, John Gibson, and Glenn Beck say we need another 9-11 to restore
our sense of purpose. They are nostalgic for the power they had after the
attacks. Of course, Goldberg sees no fascist attitudes there. But, if any
“liberals” go along for fear of being labeled “too liberal,” that is damning
proof of liberalism’s inherent fascist tendencies. By contrast, conservatives
just want to give peace a chance.

Twisting
history is hardly limited to Jonah Goldberg or Nazi analogies. At the 2011
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Ann Coulter said, “It’s just
like a liberal, they import slaves, they hold slaves, they fight for slavery,
they go to war in a civil war to defend slavery. They then install legal
discrimination against blacks for a hundred years.” Whoa! Talk about reckless
crazy talk. Obviously, she was off-message by admitting the Civil War was
fought over slavery. Is she turning into a liberal?

I
could point out that the two major political parties had traded regional bases
since the 1964 Civil Rights Act or that the Republicans had made Richard
Nixon’s race-baiting Southern Strategy a permanent fixture. But do I really
need to? After all, you can hardly call yourself the “Party of Lincoln” after
embracing Jefferson Davis. Yet, this remains a stock argument among
conservatives who say blacks should still vote Republican. Of course, Ann Coulter
did not say “Democrat” – she said “liberal,” therefore conservative Democrats
are free from stain.

Jonah
Goldberg plays the same sleight-of-hand in his book Liberal Fascism. When cataloging skeletons that he sees in
liberalism’s closet, he pads that list by writing that “the Democratic Party
was home to Jim Crow for a century.” Yes, it was also home to Strom Thurmond
until he became a Republican for some reason. Gee, I wonder why.

Both
Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg make the same dishonest stock argument. In fact,
Coulter’s rant aptly parallels how and why Goldberg wrote his book: Their
motives and techniques are identical. It is the exact same reflex.

Projecting
ideological tendencies is often part of conservative distortions. Rev. Pat
Robertson recently came out against the War on Drugs and stiff sentencing. His
move would have been refreshing if he had not pinned both policies on liberals:

Every time the liberals pass a bill – I
don’t care what it involves – they stick criminal sanctions on it. They don’t
feel there is any way people are going to keep a law unless they can put them
in jail. ... What we’re doing is turning a bunch of liberals loose writing laws
– there’s this punitive spirit, they always want to punish people.(57)

So,
to review, liberals are at fault for the military industrial complex and now
the prison industrial complex too. Who knew?

Likewise,
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ted Nugent have all called President Barack
Obama a divisive racist. These three media personalities have all made many
outrageously racist statements themselves, but Obama has made none. So, where
do you suppose that comes from? Obviously, it is projection. But it is not a
purely spontaneous reaction: It is as organized as it is organic. This is just
the latest variant of their “liberals are the real racists” argument that has become rhetorical motor memory. In
short, “I’m rubber, you’re glue” has become another stock conservative argument.

A
variant of this argument is hijacking liberal causes and figures. I think this
began in the 1980s when anti-abortion protestors claimed they had inherited the
mantle of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Today, the homophobic Westboro
Baptist church makes the same claim as they wave their “GOD HATES FAGS” signs
at funerals. As I noted before, Ronald Reagan imagined that Franklin D.
Roosevelt would agree that government had gotten out of control. Likewise,
Robert Bork had claimed that the past’s liberal icons would not recognize their
movement today and conservative pundits have subsequently run with that
assumption in the most shameless fashion.

For
example, on the fiftieth anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination, some
pundits took a brief break from Kennedy-bashing to claim JFK was a
conservative.(58) Glenn Beck said that JFK “would be a Tea Party radical” today – and Rush
Limbaugh implausibly claimed, “Kennedy was not a big believer in the Civil
Rights Act,” which I presume is a good thing in his book. Since their audiences
are primarily made of Baby Boomers, co-opting this nostalgia was probably
predictable. This was a talking point echoed by Chris Wallace and Neil Cavuto
of Fox News, as well as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston
Globe. It was just as bizarre as the claim that Martin Luther King would
have opposed affirmative action, an absurd argument made by Charles
Krauthammer, David Horowitz, and Newt Gingrich. This is just what they do now.(59) Who is next? Perhaps Glenn Beck’s hatred of Woodrow Wilson will inspire him to
reinvent Eugene V. Debs as a libertarian. If you can turn Thomas Paine into a
Creationist, anything is possible.

Are
their insane claims clinical or cynical? You have got to wonder if they believe
their own spin.(60) Glenn Beck likes to point out that Woodrow Wilson was a huge racist. This is
quite true. But, given Glenn Beck’s routine use of racist dog whistles, I
question the sincerity of his outrage. And Ted Nugent is not the only racist
comparing himself to Rosa Parks. Recently, seditious rancher Cliven Bundy did
the same shortly after saying that blacks were better off as slaves.(61)

All
these absurdities are familiar arguments, and this is why they sound so
plausible to conservative audiences. These people already live in Opposite
Land. They think that welfare causes poverty, affirmative action causes racism,
and sex education classes cause teen pregnancy. They believe government efforts
always backfire and that “liberal elites” conspire to hide the truth. So,
forget the higher teen birth rates we see where “abstinence only” programs are
taught. Never mind the rise of so many blacks into the middle class – to say
nothing of twice electing a black president by landslide. And pay no attention
to the drop in poverty after Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs started
or its rise after Ronald Reagan slashed their budgets. If a government program
does not completely wipe out a social ill, it must therefore be the cause – you
know, the same way that having fire departments causes fires.

They
are trying to rewrite the Great Depression too. As Thomas Frank wrote in Pity the Billionaire, they are using the
iconography of the New Deal against
the New Deal. The Dust Bowl photos of poverty that Glenn Beck used on his TV
show were taken by government photographers to spur Congress to action. But
Beck used them to essentially say “Look how proud and flinty we were before we
got soft from government handouts.” The photos do show dignity. That was to
counter the right’s stereotype that working class people were lazy and to build
up sympathy for them. That era had its own callous Rick Santellis calling those
who had lost their homes and farms “losers.” But unlike the stock market
speculators who had crashed the economy, these people actually made things.

Indeed,
the right had begun rewriting economic history even before the 2007 crash. You
could see this in design and fashion. When people believed the market could
never fall, art directors used Russian Constructivist fonts ironically. That
was part of the 1990s’ Soviet kitsch that went with post-Cold War triumphalism,
but things did not stop there. The retro look was in. There was an occasional
nod to the posh and dapper 1920s; but the thematic emphasis was on strength, so
the more muscular industrial aesthetic of the 1930s was favored. You often saw
Works Progress Administration-inspired designs in business newspaper and
magazine layouts. Remember, this was when suspenders and bow ties came back
into style. It was as if we had reset the twentieth century and the New Deal
had never happened – it was only acknowledged to mock it. We were now in an
alternate universe that had skipped that particular period. In this different
timeline, America had never disappointed Ayn Rand and Atlas enjoyed society’s
appreciation and deference.

And
when the market did crash, smug snark
turned into spin. This iconography was no longer used ironically, but
manipulatively. The rewrite continued, albeit with a tweak. Now, there was all
the more reason to milk this particular imagery.

As
a result of such gross distortions, Thomas Frank found some people think the
era’s anthem “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” was actually meant as an
indictment against the New Deal and Keynesian economics(!)(62) Never mind it was written by Yip Harburg, a socialist who was later blacklisted
during the McCarthy era. Never mind it was written on Herbert Hoover’s watch
before FDR was elected. Ideology trumps chronology.

This
was no isolated absurdity. As Thomas Frank has documented in many books,
conservatives have been co-opting populism for at least two decades. In their
strange alternative narrative, social workers are elitists and billionaires are
just ordinary folk. So, after causing the worst economic crisis since the Great
Depression, doubling-down on this story was only logical for them. Obviously,
they must obfuscate the past if they do not want to see a repeat of the New
Deal, and so they brazenly conflate opposites.

But
I see a larger pattern than Thomas Frank does. I have repeatedly stressed that liberty,
equality, and democracy are the three interdependent pillars of America’s
identity and documented conservative hostility toward each of them. After all,
that is my thesis. I have also shown that America’s every ethos is problematic
for conservative “patriotism,” hence their tendency to project and question
other people’s patriotism. The right’s false populism compose one example of
this reflex and their Nazi analogies form another.

A
lot of classic Americana comes out of the Great Depression and World War II.
This period both shaped and defined what is often called “The Greatest
Generation.” Since conservatives like to think that they own patriotism, they
probably would try to co-opt this era even without any economic incentive –
although, the money definitely helps too. Remember Ann Coulter rewriting the
U.S. Civil War. That was another nation-defining crisis that conservatives are
desperate to redefine because it is so awkward for them. The right’s attempt to
hijack Kennedy’s legacy and the Civil Rights Movement is just more of the same.
One of the arguments that Rush Limbaugh made to claim that John F. Kennedy was
a conservative was that JFK was “proud to be an American” – as if liberals are
not.

Of
course, Limbaugh’s obvious motive is that conservatives
are not. Consciously or not, conservatives must rewrite history to hide the
fact that their ideology is inherently un-American. Every historic moment that
reaffirms our country’s commitment to liberty, equality, or democracy is going
to be awkward for them. Once again, conservatives are chronically on the wrong
side of history because their un-American temperament puts them there.(63)

Conservative
“patriotism” is nothing but nostalgic tribalism, unencumbered by the
high-minded liberal ideals that our country was founded on. It is only a deep
need to be on a team and worship old things. But there is no real reverence for
what those old things are supposed to mean. Conservatism’s self-appointed
guardians of tradition rarely study history. Oaths and rituals substitute for
scholarship, so when they try to instruct others, they are usually
spectacularly wrong.

One
thing in Jonah Goldberg’s book that I have not fully explored vividly
illustrates this. For him, all forms of fascism are unified by the notion that
the human condition can be improved. He writes, “Most of all they share the
belief – what I call the totalitarian temptation – that with the right amount
of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of ‘creating a better world.’”(64) Forget Progressivism, this super-elastic definition of fascism stretches to fit
around the very concept of progress itself.

Yet,
perfection is a direction, not a destination. By striving for it, we improve
things. Was the founding fathers’ forming “a more perfect union” fascist? After
all, they had replaced the states rights-based Articles of Confederation with a
much stronger central government. I guess those first jackboots had big, shiny
brass buckles on them.

Astoundingly,
Jonah Goldberg also poses as a champion of the Enlightenment against guys like
Michel Foucault. Yet, Goldberg says, “The conservative or classical liberal
vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only
perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.”

Um,
that is certainly the Tory mentality, but it hardly defines the Enlightenment
or the Patriot cause. The emphatically secular revolutionaries did not wait for
the Rapture to address their grievances. They dealt with them kinetically, in
the then here-and-now. That is, after all, what revolutionaries do. But Goldberg’s version of the
Enlightenment stops just short of endorsing the Divine Right of Kings. Are you
unhappy with your lot in life? Just be patient and wait. God will fix all
after-the-fact.

Jonah
Goldberg then develops this idea that he is fighting for the Enlightenment. He
actually writes, “All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves
back to the champions of the Enlightenment – John Locke, Adam Smith,
Montesquieu, Burke.”(65) That is a pretty narrow pantheon of champions considering his highly elastic
definition of fascism. I suppose I should credit him with omitting Cato.
Although, I imagine he would get along much better with Samuel Johnson than
anyone on his woefully short list. Are not Voltaire and Rousseau also champions
of the Enlightenment? And why are there no American
thinkers on his list? Like the Texas State Board of Education, I guess that
Jonah Goldberg had found none whom he could truly admire.

And
this is the key: Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck, and those other rightwing think
tank writers are ultimately trying to hide the fact that the Progressive Era
was a resumption of the Enlightenment
after a period of romanticized reaction. It was a rebirth of reason and
compassion after the Victorian Era’s selfish feudal enthusiasm which was
epitomized by the “sham castles” that Mark Twain had mocked.

Certainly,
Revolutionary Era feminists like Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent-Murray, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Marie Olympe De Gouges
would have applauded women finally getting the vote. They argued that it was an
inherent part of the Enlightenment’s ideology of liberty. As Abigail Adams had
warned her husband John, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the
Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves
bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”(66) And across the pond, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, “The divine right of husbands,
like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened
age, be contested without danger.”(67) Alas, she was wrong about that last part. The French government guillotined Marie Olympe De Gorges for writing
her “Declaration of the Rights of Women.” (The Progressive Era’s suffragettes
also faced violence in the form of beatings by police.) For some reason, these
women did not make it onto Jonah Goldberg’s list either.

Conservatism
is un-American in part because perpetual improvement is part of our national
ethos. Like William F. Buckley, conservatives stand “athwart history, yelling
Stop.”(68) Like Robert Bork, they have a problem with the very concept of progress. By
contrast, Thomas Jefferson thought “We might as well require a man to wear
still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever
under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” That is probably why he too is
absent from Jonah Goldberg’s pantheon.

But
do not look for Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine in there either since their
social program proposals obviously disqualify them. And forget other
spread-the-wealth advocates like Noah Webster and James Madison, for that
matter. Goldberg’s “Champions of the Enlightenment” would make a
disappointingly short trading card set.

Even
a cursory survey of the founders’ efforts shows their progressive impulses.
Benjamin Franklin constantly proposed new “improvements,” i.e. public works
projects. Thomas Jefferson was the consummate technocrat and civil engineer.
When designing the new national capitol, he laid out streets and sewer lines to
facilitate sanitation and fight disease – which was quite important since
Washington, D.C. was built on a drained swamp. These men were hardcore city
planning geeks seeped in the spirit of idealistic civil servants. They would
have thrilled to the heady, energetic days of the early New Deal. You know that
Benjamin Franklin and Franklin D. Roosevelt would have hit it off. They would
have been like twins! Both jolly men were charming, hard-partying policy wonks
who got busy fixing things the next morning. Cartoonist Kate Beaton needs to
commit this awesome team-up to paper right now.

Again,
many of our founders were social engineers who always sought to advance the
common good. Applying the latest scientific thinking in every area of life for
the benefit of all defined both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive
Era. Since the right cannot patriotically assault the first era, they must
therefore assault the second. Conservatism is therefore the eternal enemy of
the Enlightenment, and thus, the conservative assault on progressivism is
ultimately an assault on America itself. It is the logical end product of
William F. Buckley’s and Robert Bork’s thought. This is (and, in fact, has
always been) conservatism’s inherent trajectory, whether articulated with
dignified erudition or lurid Nazi analogies. Whatever the conveyance, the
eventual destination remains the same.

Jonah
Goldberg’s contribution to modern political discourse has both left its mark
and met its goal. His goal was not the cessation of Nazi analogies, but to
disassociate right wing politics from right wing politics and to assault the
very concept of progress itself in the process. And he accomplished both by
conflating political opposites.

This
conscious confusing left with right taps into some troubling historical
thought. Nazi propaganda had always conflated capitalists with communists by
arguing that Jews secretly controlled both and were using them in a
“two-pronged assault” on “Christian civilization.” If someone uses the labels
“capitalist” and “communist” interchangeably, you can safely guess where they
are going from there.

For
example, in the late 1930s, Father Coughlin, “the radio priest,” claimed that Kristallnacht was ultimately the
comeuppance to “Jewish bankers, Kuhn Loeb & Company of New York, among
those who helped finance the Russian Revolution and Communism.”(69) Likewise, Pat Robertson claimed that “Wall Street bankers” had
“enthusiastically financed Bolshevism in the Soviet Union since 1917.”(70) (Again, the National Review had
excused this.) The use of this argument brings their probable politics into
sharper focus. It is like when someone says we should have stayed out of World
War II, as both Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran had.

Today,
the Tea Party tries to co-opt populist rage against Wall Street and then
redirect it against Washington, D.C. by arguing that rich liberals are plotting
to destroy capitalism. According to Glenn Beck, rich liberals have been
patiently planning this since Woodrow Wilson was president almost a century
ago. Thus, the Tea Party is presumably trying to save capitalism from sinister
capitalists. They have deftly harnessed anger against banks to fight any regulation of banks.

There
is no exaggerating how bizarre their narrative is. As Thomas Frank explained in
Pity the Billionaire, “For them,
Democrats are devil figures; there was no contradiction in depicting them as
both pawns of the banks and also the persecutors of them. Democrats were so
malignant they could play both roles simultaneously.”(71) While describing a 2010 Rand Paul campaign advertisement, Frank quipped, “The
viewer is expected both to hate AIG and feel compassion for it in the space of
thirty seconds.”

As
I noted before, mixed messages prey on mixed feelings. For decades, the
religion of deregulation was preached by every talking head. Then, the
financial crisis triggered a crisis of faith, leaving people angry and
confused. Much like how traditionalist Germans felt after the Kaiser fled to
Holland after World War I, their worldview was disgraced. Many had groped for
any shabby rationalization to simultaneously cling to belief and be angry too.
System failure was both indisputable and searing, but cherished certainties do
not retire gracefully. They dig in, lie dormant, and wait for reinforcements to
arrive with fresh rationalizations to reconcile their new reality with their
old ideology.

Enter
the Tea Party saying the financial crisis was not caused by too little
regulation, but too much and that
liberals deliberately engineer crises to make us more dependent on government –
hence Glenn Beck calling billionaire investor George Soros “the puppet master”
of a vast conspiracy to destroy America.

This
thinking rings familiar for two obvious reasons:

First,
the right has always tried to steer working class frustration away from rich
conservatives and toward rich liberals. Before Soros, the Kennedy family was
frequently the target of this treatment – and before them it was the
Roosevelts. Any assault against “Hollywood liberals” is in the same vein.
Indeed, the previous needle marks have since been replaced with a convenient
valve. To conservatives, rich liberals are class traitors.

Second,
Glenn Beck’s conspiracy theory sounds like a personalized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the
anti-Semitic tract that Hitler’s friend Henry Ford had promoted. Beck’s
explanation of events only differs in that he is careful to say “liberals”
instead of “Jews,” but his script is otherwise identical. It is meant to hit
the same bigoted buttons. It is easy to see projection in Glenn Beck’s Nazi
analogies, and I suspect that his love of wearing uniforms is not entirely
ironic.

In
fact, Glenn Beck has promoted fascist tracts himself. On his radio show, he
praised a 1936 book called The Red Network: A “Who’s Who” and Handbook of
Radicalism for Patriots. The
book’s author, Elizabeth Dilling, was a rabid racist. Evidence of this is in
the book itself. “Neither the races nor the sexes can ever be equal. They will
always be different and have distinctive functions to perform in life.”(72) On the same page she had written, “God created separate races, but Communism
insists upon racial inter-mixture and inter-marriage.” Perhaps that is why so
many Tea Party members think that President Obama was a red diaper baby.

Elizabeth
Dilling was an avid Nazi who attended rallies in both Germany and the U.S. She
attacked the Allies after Hitler invaded Poland, and resisted the war effort
after Pearl Harbor. Dilling later described President Dwight Eisenhower as “Ike
the kike” and called President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” the “Jew
Frontier.”(73)

And
speaking of “Who’s Who”-type books, Elizabeth Dilling has her own entry in the Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook
on the Radical Racist Right. “To Dilling, Franklin Roosevelt was in all
likelihood a Jew and his administration a Trojan horse for international
communism.”(74) Simply change the word “Jew” to “Muslim” and that is exactly what many Tea
Party members say about President Obama today.

And
although obsessed with racial purity, Dilling liked to mix her terminology. She
oxymoronically called herself a “Tory, patriot”(75) which is just as ass-backwards as calling someone else a “fascist-socialist.”

Elizabeth
Dilling was a fringe figure, but today the fringe increasingly defines the
debate. Forget, for one moment, the fact that Glenn Beck had Fox News’s
highest-rated show. A 2012 poll found that 63% of Republicans still think that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction when we invaded Iraq in 2003!(76) Evidence does not sway them. In fact, it does the opposite and fortifies their
faith in false beliefs. As I wrote in the introduction, they will respond to my
founding fathers quotes the same way Creationists react to dinosaur bones. And
once you think of the Creation Museum, how they arrive at their Nazi analogies
becomes quite plain – they just stir everything together. Just as they drop
dinosaurs into the Garden of Eden, socialists become fascists. Because why not?
And if they ignore biologists and geologists, they will ignore historians too.
I doubt they will relinquish their cherished Nazis analogies. After all, the
Scopes Trail was back in 1925.

Adolf
Hitler bragged that sewing confusion was one of his most effective weapons.
Along these lines, conservatives have always conflated patriotism with
nationalism and disassociated democracies from republics. Equating progressives
with fascists is only their latest trick. The conservative narrative is
Orwellian: bankers are Bolsheviks, doves are hawks, egalitarians are elitists,
libertines are punitive, and Tories are patriots. Of course, once you decide
that the Enlightenment boils down to the medieval idea of “life sucks and then
you die,” none of this seems like much of a jump anymore.

Discredited
beliefs may temporarily recede into the background noise, but then they
resurge. Remember that Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon had both dismissed conservative critics of the New Deal as irrelevant,
isolated cranks. But when Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, the cranks came
back and even took over the Democratic Party in the 1990s. We went from Richard
Nixon saying “I am now a Keynesian in economics” to Bill Clinton declaring “The
era of big government is over.” The reactionary fringe will always be waiting
in the wings.

But
then, there is everybody else. Another thing I wrote in the introduction is
that politics is not the art of converting your opponent but of swaying the
political middle. Fox News had had a minor, surprisingly respectful freak-out
when Pope Francis called economic inequality “tyranny,” so I do not suppose
they will have an open mind when I point out that many of our founding fathers
had already said the same thing. Naturally, Rush Limbaugh’s self-identified
“Ditto-heads” will probably not listen. But it gives the undecided something to
think about and that is how politics actually works.

But,
how can we talk about the right’s anti-democratic animus? After all, a literal
monarchist metamorphosis is no longer in the cards and overuse has rendered
fascist analogies nearly meaningless. So, how can we talk about this without
mentioning kings and seeming quaintly irrelevant or mentioning Nazis and
seeming utterly nuts?

Unfortunately,
the frank answer is we cannot. Historical honesty demands context, as does our
national identity. However, we can choose our point of emphasis, so I suggest
we revive the word “Tory” as a stock insult. With only one word it acknowledges
our revolutionary heritage and reminds everyone what America is supposed to
stand for, or at least sparks a debate on the topic.

Of
course, this action has two caveats.

First,
I am not saying that we should never mention fascists. Obviously, Holocaust
deniers who praise Franco and Pinochet qualify, so folks like Pat Buchanan and
Joseph Sobran are still fair game. If you are talking about actual fascists, it
is not an analogy anymore but a simple fact. You are not only safe saying it,
accuracy actually requires it.

Second,
we cannot stop conservatives from using Nazi analogies, so any liberal or
leftist self-restraint will likely be a one-sided endeavor. No moratorium will
enforce itself any more than the market will regulate itself. The right will
still exploit whatever tactic is most effective for them. They will show all
the scruples of a Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Lee Atwater, or Karl Rove.
Conservatives have the most to gain from this moratorium, and yet we all know
that they would be the least likely to honor it.

I
am not just talking about the right’s typical Nixonian dickishness, although
that is a factor too. Nor am I talking about the difficulty of kicking
satisfying old habits which have rewarded them with so much Pavlovian
reinforcement. No, I am arguing that their reflexive projecting is
ideologically hard-wired. They are pretty sensitive about their guilty history.
Indeed, their playing the Nazi card almost sounds like a “cry for help” because
rational self-interest does not explain that gambit. Throwing stones from glass
houses does not even begin to describe their ingrained habit.

I
am not exaggerating when I say their projecting is reflexive because I do not
think that they can control it anymore. Blurting out bulletins from Opposite
Land is just how they deal with the world now. Their feel-good history is oddly
apocalyptic. But what else can you expect from authoritarians who think that
they are libertarians?

We
cannot stop conservatives from making Nazi analogies, but we can force a shift
of venue by refocusing on the Revolutionary Era. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s talk of
Toryism had reminded us who we were and the rough economic equality that so
many founders thought was essential to a republic must be restored. We can
accomplish this without Nazi name-calling. It is not only possible but
promising. And given our history, this is the most logical course of action.

Here
is an example of how we can do this. Take that famous Rev. Martin Niemöller
quote which starts “When they came for the communists, I did not do anything
because I was not a communist.” Strangely, a lot of conservative pundits have
been invoking it lately. Some shorten the quote by dropping the communist part,
so I struggle mightily to imagine them sheltering suspected Reds or any other
opponent of Mussolini’s Corporate State. I would certainly hesitate to tell
union organizers that Glenn Beck has their backs when the Gestapo or the
American Legion shows up at their front door.

But,
levity aside, we are still left with the question of how do we express this
societal dynamic without mentioning Nazis? Well, do you remember that Thomas
Paine quote on defending your enemies that I keep mentioning? “He that would
make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression: for if
he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach unto
himself.” This principle should not be limited to “card-carrying members of the
ACLU.” And the fact that conservatives use that phrase derisively displays
their complete contempt for free society.

Not
every World War II idea or incident has a Revolutionary Era parallel. But when
one exists, we should probably default to it, if it fits. And by studying our
history we are better equipped to block conservative assaults on liberty,
equality, and democracy. For example, it is important to know that the founders
were mostly deists when would-be theocrats try to legislate their morality.
This information does not dissuade the theocrat, but it is important for
everyone else to know it. And if you can point to Thomas Paine’s social
security proposal, those who associate social programs with jackboots have
already lost because it effectively prevents playing the Nazi card.

Okay,
perhaps “prevent” is not quite the right verb. After all, conservatives will
still try. Moreover, the Nazi card is very emotional and distracting – and it
is always to the right’s advantage to distract. But, if we stay on track, I
think the Revolutionary Era argument may carry the day. And it might even wean
those covert Roosevelt haters off Woodrow Wilson and back onto Thomas Paine.
Perhaps.

But
I do not want to create unrealistic expectations. Even if we could curb Nazi
analogies, conservatives would still have the same reflexes. When not calling
abortion “worse than the Holocaust,” they say abortion is “worse than slavery.”
That is now a talking point for them. Sarah Palin had likewise equated the
national debt to slavery and then faulted African Americans for objecting to
her strange comparison. I am not sure how long that practice of theirs will
last. Surely it creates some tension with their Neo-Confederate “states rights”
wing. Perhaps they originally adopted Nazi analogies because they made a safer
foreign comparison rather than an awkward domestic one. In any case, I still
think that calling them Tories will raise the tone of the discussion.

Some
will object to substituting one form of name-calling for another and ask how
any insult can raise the tone. But, in politics, there is no avoiding labels or
hurt feelings. And, as a sometime cartoonist and fan of satire, I recognize
that insults can do good.

Calling
someone a Tory in America would certainly be a direct challenge to their patriotism.
I am not denying that. (That is, after all, the idea.) But, it would still be a
pretty tame insult – almost a gentle rebuke. It would suggest that the target
is antiquated and irrelevant. Indeed, it would almost make them cuddly, like
Archie Bunker. And we already know that paleoconservatives do not strenuously
object to being called political fossils. That or they do not know what the
word “paleo” means. So, how strongly could they possibly object to being called
Tories? They are opponents of progress and staunch defenders of tradition and
hierarchy, so they would quite likely wear the label with great pride. And they
are already big fans of Margaret Thatcher, so there is also that.

More
importantly, calling someone antiquated is different from calling them evil
incarnate which is what the Nazi label is meant to suggest. It is much easier
to picture yourself reasoning with a Tory than with a Nazi. The Tory metaphor
is admittedly Anglo-centric. However, it does, paradoxically, refocus our
attention what America is all about. And we all know that conservatives do not
really want to have that talk.

Again,
Nazi analogies distract us from discussing America’s true identity, and that
ultimately benefits conservatives. So instead, we should just call them Tories.
After all, some of them already identify as “Tory Patriots.” And that oxymoron
aptly sums up all the inherent contradictions in American conservatism.

1) Admittedly, it is amusing to point out Objectivism’s
Maoist streak. It had a cult of personality and lists of banned or approved
books and music. But nobody is saying that Ayn Rand’s acolytes were actually
reds. Only conservatives reach that degree of total distortion. In his book,
Jonah Goldberg plays an interesting game: If fascists ever used a particular
technique or strategy, anyone else who uses the same is painted as a kindred
spirit. This calls to mind a footnote in Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The
Paranoid Style in American Politics” on extremists’ tendency to copy their
opposites. “In his recent book, How to
Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao
Tse-tung: ‘Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the
village.’ Shadegg comments: ‘In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in
all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the
advice of Mao Tse-tung.’ ‘I would suggest,’ writes Senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? ‘that we analyze and
copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.’” Although
it is fun to imagine Barry Goldwater in a frumpy uniform waving a copy of Mao’s
“Little Red Book,” it is not a vision I think anyone should take seriously.

2) I am certainly not the first person to notice
psychological projection in politics. In “The Paranoid Style in American
Politics” Richard Hofstadter wrote about it, albeit with a slightly different
emphasis: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many
counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects
of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan
intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship,
even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations
give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of
donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally
elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and
quasi-secret operation through ‘front’ groups, and preaches a ruthless
prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds
in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist
‘crusades’ openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline
the Communist cause calls forth.” Although I rely on the assumption of
projection throughout the book, I am open to alternate interpretations of this
behavior. It could just be that conservatives’ lack of empathy and imagination
simply make it difficult for them to see things from other people’s
perspectives or imagine anyone thinking in any other way.

9) William E. Dodd, “Letter of Ambassador Dodd to Senators,” New York Times, May 12, 1937, p. 4.

10) George Seldes, Facts and Fascism (New
York: In Fact, 1943), 77. I must confess that I am amused by the New York
Times’s October 26, 1938 headline: “KNUSEN WARNS LABOR ON OUTPUT: Production
Must Be Kept Up if Hours Are Cut, He Says on Return from Europe: TELLS OF
REICH’S GAINS: Calls It’s Transformation the ‘Miracle of the 20th
Century’ – Musicians Arrive” They were on the boat as well.

11) Ibid., 44.

12) Ibid., 43. For some reason, that era’s plutocrats loved Mussolini the most. Was
it because he had invented fascism or because of the former socialist’s shift
from left to right? I have often heard Mussolini’s early socialism invoked to
bolster the claim that socialists are fascists. I suppose the thinking goes,
“Once a socialist, always a socialist.” But if that is how it works, then David
Horowitz is still a 1960s campus radical and Ronald Reagan died a New Deal
Democrat.

13) Jonah Goldberg, “Springtime for Slanderers; Who are you calling a Nazi?”
National Review Online January 5, 2001.

14) “Coulter Culture,” The New York Observer,
October 2, 2007. The quote goes: “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d
never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe
dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at
least single women.”

15) Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland;
Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987),
105.

16) Ibid. To quote more fully, “Antifeminist women seized upon the rhetoric of
rights, but twisted its meaning to mean the ‘right’ of women to remain in the
domestic sphere. Many women, who had been apathetic about national issues
before they could vote, used their newly won rights to mobilize against further
change. Few grasped the paradox of their double mission of entering public life
to defend women’s private family sphere. Without either education or upbringing
that might have prepared them to take advantage of their new rights, these
women wanted ‘Emancipation from Emancipation!’ – a slogan later taken up by
Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Two-thirds of all married German women
considered themselves primarily housewives. Swearing to reinforce, not
threaten, male prerogatives, they set out to defend traditional morality
against decadence, which they linked to large cities and poor people.”

18) Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland;
Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987),
116.

19) The film’s story was written by Fritz Lang’s wife who
later became an ardent Nazi. Lang himself was not so enthusiastic and skipped
the country for Hollywood shortly after Hitler came to power. His wife stayed,
but he never regretted his decision. Shitty politics aside, the film is a
visually magnificent, seminal science fiction masterpiece that later inspired Star Wars. Find the latest Criterion edition.
Even the goofy-ass, quasi-colorized version with 1980s pop songs inserted is
worth watching once.

20) Jeff Cohen, “In his own words: The history book on Patrick Buchanan,” FAIR,
October 3, 1999.

27) Of course, conservatives do not have a monopoly on hostility to democracy.
Soviet era Stalinists were just as openly contemptuous of the democratic
process as any paleo-conservative on Free Republic.com – just as contemptuous
and just as confused, since Karl Marx had specified that economic equality
required political equality to survive. Obviously, without democracy, you
cannot keep those in power from taking a bigger slice of the pie, hence George
Orwell’s pointing out that the Soviet leaders had become just another ruling
class.

28)Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and
the American Press, dir. Rick Goldsmith, 111 min., Never Tire Productions,
1996 and 2006, DVD. Quote starts at 1:30:47. Incidentally, every American has a
patriotic duty to watch this documentary.

31) Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No
Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s (New York: Fireside Press, 1989),
128-129. Start reading on April 11, 1985. Also, note the entry for February 16,
1984 on page 85.

32) John B. Judis, “White House Vigilante: Pat Buchanan
takes matters into his own hands.” New
Republic, January 26, 1987, 18.

33) William F. Buckley, “Meddling in South Africa,” Palm Beach Post, August 21, 1985.
Buckley pointed out that we do not practice “one man, one vote” because the
Senate gives equal weight to smaller states. However, we have unquestionably
been moving toward that “fanatical abstraction” as the direct election of
senators illustrates. And in 1985, we were certainly closer to it than
Apartheid South Africa. Buckley’s argument was that we were in no position to
lecture South Africa. On the contrary, we were in an excellent position
considering our recent, similar experience.

34) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The
Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), 398.

35) Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why
the Right is Wrong for America, (New York: Simon and Schuster), 1996),
109-111.

36) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The
Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), 20.

39) Jill Lepore, “Birthright: What’s next for Planned Parenthood?” The New Yorker, November 14, 2011, 49.

40) As Jill Lepore expounded on her article on NPR’s Fresh Air, “She founds a
journal called the Birth Control Review, and she asks [Paul] Poponoe, [the
co-author of Applied Eugenics] to contribute to it. She goes to D.C. to debate
Poponoe. These eugenicists that Sanger is courting are actually generally
opposed to birth control because they considered it, and Poponoe writes at the
time, that ‘birth control is the reverse of eugenics.’” Air date November 9,
2011.

41) Russ Bellant, Old
Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and
Their Effect on U.S. Cold War Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 60.

42) Roger Pearson, Eugenics and Race
(London: Clair Press, 1966), 26.

43) Russ Bellant, Old
Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks and
Their Effect on U.S. Cold War Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1988),
61-63.

45) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal
Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics
of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 245.

46) William F. Buckley, Jr., “Crucial Steps in Combating
the Aids Epidemic; Identify All the Carriers,” New York Times, March 18, 1986. But perhaps I see contradiction
where there is consistency. After all, that was Buckley trying to be
compassionate toward uninfected gays and drug addicts and Goldberg equates
compassion with fascism. Maybe this is what he means when he says “We are all
fascists now.”

47) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The
Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), 115.

48) The interview exchange goes: “If ever needed, the
American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals
as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy.”

“By taking over the government?” he
was asked.

“Exactly that,” he replied. “The
American Legion is fighting every element that threatens our democratic
government – soviets, anarchists, IWW, revolutionary socialists and every other
‘red.’… Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion
is to the United States.”

49) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The
Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), 147.

51)Pat Buchanan in His Own Words,” FAIR press release,
February 26, 1996.

52)Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini
to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 99.

53) Ibid., 160.

54) Ibid., 6. Amusingly, he does mention Christina Hoff
Sommers’s book The War Against Boys
much later on. But at least he does not call that a “liberal equivalency of
war.” Doesn’t he realize that entry is going to be near the War on Poverty in the
index?

55) Fascists did indeed preach getting “beyond politics” and finding a “third way”
between left and right. But they meant getting beyond class conflict. I have
already given a few examples – from Mussolini’s “harmonization” to Hitler’s
enthusiasm for Ford’s affordable cars. This poses a problem for those who
conflate fascism with communism. Obviously, the communists sought to stoke class conflict, not get beyond it.
Of course, Goldberg ignores this and instead paints any urgent bi-partisan
appeal as fascist. Absent this context, things morph into their opposites and
any talk of class gets called fascist. In January of 2014, venture capitalist
Tom Perkins predicted a “Progressive Kristallnacht” in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that compared the
Occupy Wall Street movement’s criticism of the rich to the Nazis’
anti-Semitism. Two months later, billionaire Home Depot co-founder Ben Langone
echoed Perkins’ attack on populist rhetoric, “[I]f you go back to 1933, with
different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive
as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” Actually,
Langone’s last line was what Hitler was saying in 1933.

56) Abram Rosenblatt, et al., “Evidence for Terror Management Theory: I: The
effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold
cultural values,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 57, no. 4 (1989): 681-690. My thanks to Jordan S. Carroll
for alerting me to this study.

57) The quote sandwiches a segment in which the CBN reporter conscientiously
stressed that this issue is uniting unlikely allies on Right and Left. But
Robertson ignores this, portraying being punitive as a liberal trait.
Amusingly, conservatives have two central concerns in this matter: tax costs
and shielding white collar crooks I guess Pat’s friends are terrified of being
sent to “Club Fed.” This is an unexpected dividend of the era of Enron.
Apparently, Wendy Kaminer was correct when she said, “If ‘a conservative is a
liberal once mugged,’ then a liberal is a conservative once arrested.” A simple
keyword search will turn up the video of Robertson.

59) At one point, Jonah Goldberg sort of claims that
liberals do the same, but it does not quite work. He writes, “As for Ronald
Reagan, he is enjoying what may be the most remarkable rehabilitation in modern
American history – as is Barry Goldwater, who all of a sudden has become a hero
to the liberal establishment. It seems that American liberals can appreciate
dead conservatives when they become useful cudgels to beat up on living ones.”
(pg. 394) This sample of Jonah Goldberg’s deceptiveness is trivial but typical.
Liberals began to soften on Goldwater way back in the 1980s when, like Ayn
Rand, the Arizona senator had criticized Ronald Reagan’s association with the
Moral Majority. This was also why liberals had liked Goldwater’s political protégé and successor, John McCain
(R-AZ). The “Maverick” was also openly contemptuous of the religious right – at
least until he began running for president. Goldwater’s stock with liberals
grew even more in the 1990s. During Whitewater, he called a press conference to
defend Bill Clinton telling his fellow Republicans to “get off his back and let
him be president.” (Lloyd Grove, “Barry Goldwater’s Left Turn,” Washington Post, July 28, 1994.)
Goldwater also wrote an op-ed advocating allowing gays to openly serve in the
military and that sealed his reputation among both liberals and conservatives.
Contrary to Jonah Goldberg’s ugly picture of liberals cynically using the dead,
liberals befriended Barry Goldwater when conservatives shunned and punished
him. “They want to change the name of the party headquarters from the Goldwater
building to something else,” Goldwater boasted. “They want to take my name off
the airport. They want to take my name off the high school. They want to take
my name off the lake up north.” In fact, Barry Goldwater is today enjoying a
postmortem political rehabilitation among conservatives
– but only because the Tea Party’s phony libertarian rhetoric makes it
necessary. Talk about grave robbing! And there is a big difference between
heroicizing a figure and saying his ideological descendants are even more
extreme. As I noted in the introduction, many prominent Republicans have said
that not even Ronald Reagan could get ahead in today’s GOP. If Republicans can
say this, why can’t liberals?

60) While reading Liberal Fascism, you
keep expecting Jonah Goldberg to say that he is just kidding and that his whole
400 page book is just a clever exercise written to show how all Nazi analogies
are only word games and should therefore be unceremoniously ignored. It never
quite happens. Instead, his book is littered with disclaimers of dubious
sincerity. Again and again he basically says “I’m not saying that liberals are
Nazis, but liberals are Nazis. Just nice Nazis.” That is certainly his desired
takeaway. Eventually, his frequent qualifiers take on an almost “I’m not a
racist, but …” quality. There are two reasons for this. First is the fact that
his disclaimers have zero impact on his argument. They exist only so that he
can say they exist. As Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic, “As always in this book, the canard survives the
complexities.” Secondly, actually taking Jonah Goldberg’s disclaimers at face
value essentially renders his thesis meaningless. Reviewers across the
political spectrum have noticed this. Tomasky asked in exasperation, “Isn’t all
this at once so broad and so qualified as to be meaningless?” In The American Conservative Austin Bramwell
wrote, “Goldberg does at times display a blush of shame. He qualifies his
conclusions to the point of taking them all back, insisting that he does not
actually mean to say that liberals are dangerous totalitarians. He grants that
some of his points are trivial and others may appear outrageous, so that
nothing he says should be taken as both true and interesting at the same time.
He claims that movement conservatives also suffer from the totalitarian
temptation, so that we are ‘all’ fascists now. Why then link liberalism in
particular with fascism? Here Goldberg is surprisingly candid: because, he
argues, liberals do it to conservatives all the time.” Tomasky suspects another
motive besides revenge. “Lurking behind all these futile disclaimers may be Goldberg’s
well-founded fear that intelligent or knowledgeable readers might conclude that
he is crazy.” The two theories are not mutually exclusive. Just what Jonah
Goldberg really believes is elusive, but it is clear what he wants his audience
to think. The same dynamic plays out in his appearances on Glenn Beck’s show.
Like Penn Jillette, Goldberg pretends to gently correct the audience’s
misconceptions, but he is really only there to tweak and reaffirm them.
Goldberg tells Beck that Hillary Clinton is not literally a fascist, but then
says that she has fascist tendencies and resumes listing ways that he thinks
that liberals are like fascists. This subtle distinction is no doubt lost on
most of Beck’s audience and is ultimately meaningless even if it does stick
since they will use it the same way that Goldberg does. But if Goldberg is
worried about looking crazy, he might not want to write so many exclusive
essays for Beck’s paid subscribers.

63) I think that their highly defensive handling of racism exemplifies this. They
grasp that being called a racist is a bad thing, yet they only partially
register why. Racism is not simply impolite or politically incorrect, but fundamentally
un-American. It is against our core egalitarian ethos. But bringing that up
triggers multiple issues. For conservatives, patriotism is nothing but
nostalgic tribalism. But when someone brings up principles, they bring up
irksome responsibilities and unfinished business. One of these things is really
thinking about America’s identity. There is a meaning beyond “GO TEAM!” and
romanticizing the past. Even if you are not a racist, the subject matter itself
is loaded with all these awkward, unwelcome abstractions. You may not hate
outsiders or the “Other,” but you do not want to re-think patriotism either.
And you sense that your belonging is somehow under assault even if nobody
frames it that way because you have just been reminded that patriotism is a lot
more complicated than you want it to be and that also means that it feels very
different. The ground feels less certain beneath your feet and the result is a
kind of “kill the messenger” hostility. Yes, some also lash back and project
out of guilt because they really are racists and have been caught at it. Ted
Nugent and his audience are an obvious example. But there are additional,
invisible issues on the table, so the emotional stakes are higher than most
people realize.

64) Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The
Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), 15.

65) Ibid.,175. The two lines immediately before this are hugely amusing and typical
of the silliness you find on every page. “For more than sixty years, liberals
have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream
of the political right. And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was
a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.” Apparently, Jonah
Goldberg has never heard of Ayn Rand. She was a huge devotee of Nietzsche.
Indeed, Nietzsche’s superman was the template for all of her heroes. This is an
interesting oversight, given Ayn Rand’s hostile relationship with the National Review. The bad blood began
with a negative review that Whittaker Chambers wrote about Atlas Shrugged. “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity,
commanding: ‘To the gas chambers – go!’” Once again, Jonah Goldberg seems
“operationally uninterested in the intellectual history” of his own magazine.
Maybe, I should edit it instead.